All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[jetengine]

Honestly? Everyone in those crowd is delusional. No American is truly "free", individualism doesnt work anymore unless you enjoy living a 19th century lifestyle of back breaking labour and archaic to non existent medical treatment. Even the people on those Alaska shows still have to interact with the modern world around them. If the government wanted you dead ? Your dead. Freedom seems to be the chsnt these guys have when their asked to follow badic rules of a 21st century society.

[PwrdOn]

sammy wasn't blaming China for everything, do you think the Chinese government's done anything wrong about containing Covid-19?



The others have gone over the protests you're ignoring, thank you everyone.

The highlighted portion are Republican talking points, we're discussing Democrats. This is "Both Sidesing," your argument hinges on Democrats being exactly like Republicans, on a forum of Democrats and people who sympathize with Democrats.

So you're ok with Putin taking Ukraine. Interesting.

Of course the Chinese government messed up its response to the outbreak and the public paid dearly for that mistake. But it requires quite some degree of contortion to believe that they purposely allowed the virus to spread internationally or whatever the allegation is these days.

Also, protesting the Iraq War was definitely not the mainstream Democratic position at the time, hence why so many politicians have had to defend their votes on the AUMF in the years since. It's not that the Democrats are exactly like the Republicans, but when the chips are down they tend to provide very feeble opposition and pretty much let the Republicans do whatever they want. When it comes to China, the Democrats seem to be keen on painting themselves as even more hawkish and nationalistic than the Republicans, and I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that there will probably be no glorious democratizing crusade but just another quagmire that everybody will pretend like they were against all along.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

New Jersey is on the target list, only I don't think they can get away with it here as easily as in other states.

I could be wrong, but only New York as a state has had more deaths from coronavirus than New Jersey. I'm sure those Branch COVIDians (I didn't come up with that) in your state won't be so stupid as to hold mass gatherings while ignoring social distancing rules, knowing that has the potential to be a shortcut to an early grave.

[Steel Inquisitor]

Of course the Chinese government messed up its response to the outbreak and the public paid dearly for that mistake. But it requires quite some degree of contortion to believe that they purposely allowed the virus to spread internationally or whatever the allegation is these days.

Sammy's simply addressing the eye raising responses they did and wants to know more because nobody should take government's word on anything with blind faith.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/83530...fight-in-china

ZHONG: He's the hero of China.

FENG: When Dr. Li Wenliang, a whistleblowing doctor, later died himself of the coronavirus, it was Zhong Nanshan that channeled that public grief when he openly cried in a taped interview with Reuters.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHONG: I'm so proud of him. He told people the truth.

FENG: The COVID-19 outbreak is not Dr. Zhong's first time battling a deadly respiratory disease. He made his name during the 2003 SARS outbreak, when he developed a controversial steroid treatment that cured many SARS patients but left some with debilitating bone issues.

Also, protesting the Iraq War was definitely not the mainstream Democratic position at the time, hence why so many politicians have had to defend their votes on the AUMF in the years since. It's not that the Democrats are exactly like the Republicans, but when the chips are down they tend to provide very feeble opposition and pretty much let the Republicans do whatever they want. When it comes to China, the Democrats seem to be keen on painting themselves as even more hawkish and nationalistic than the Republicans, and I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that there will probably be no glorious democratizing crusade but just another quagmire that everybody will pretend like they were against all along.

Don't move the goal posts, your argument was that nobody in America was against the Iraq war. Except that's not what your previous posts described Democrats, that they were doing exactly the same thing as Republicans were with Freedom fries and everything, which is untrue. The opposition wasn't strong because the Republicans ruled, they were an unstoppable juggernaut after 9/11. They intimidated people into going along with them and attacked those who didn't and ignored reality when they saw fit.

Be more specific with being hawkish about China. How? Who's doing it? Why is it bad?

Democrats aren't going to get into a war with China over this. Trump, however, might.

[PwrdOn]

Sammy's simply addressing the eye raising responses they did and wants to know more because nobody should take government's word on anything with blind faith.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/83530...fight-in-china






Don't move the goal posts, your argument was that nobody in America was against the Iraq war. Except that's not what your previous posts described Democrats, that they were doing exactly the same thing as Republicans were with Freedom fries and everything, which is untrue. The opposition wasn't strong because the Republicans ruled, they were an unstoppable juggernaut after 9/11. They intimidated people into going along with them and attacked those who didn't and ignored reality when they saw fit.

Be more specific with being hawkish about China. How? Who's doing it? Why is it bad?

Democrats aren't going to get into a war with China over this. Trump, however, might.

Nobody did take the government's word on blind faith, there was unprecedented public opposition within China to the mishandling of the virus at first. However, when Westerners started to chime in with their usual orientalist canards about how the outbreak was an indictment on how backwards China was, the conversation completely shifted toward near universal support for the government's containment efforts. Talking to people there you could really see this turn in real time, and you can only imagine if Western governments had spent half the energy they spent rebuking China on actually preparing contingency plans perhaps things would not have gotten so out of hand.

As far as the Democratic party platform, as usual it's pretty disjointed and incoherent. They recognize that the American public generally doesn't like China and wants to appeal to that sensibility, but at the same time they aren't really committed to economic decoupling because they have no interest in trying to rebuild the industrial base at home or providing for American workers, nor to military pressure because they don't want to expend the blood and treasure to make that happen. As best as I can tell their strategy is to try and isolate China internationally while trying to replace their workers with even cheaper labor from places like Vietnam or India, which will certainly backfire because as those countries start to build up their economic and geopolitical strength they'll probably want to expand their power and influence as well instead of just remaining docile servants of Western hegemony.

[jetengine]

All Democrats are doing atm is going "China fucked up and Trump believed them because he's an idiot"

[jetengine]

Nobody did take the government's word on blind faith, there was unprecedented public opposition within China to the mishandling of the virus at first. However, when Westerners started to chime in with their usual orientalist canards about how the outbreak was an indictment on how backwards China was, the conversation completely shifted toward near universal support for the government's containment efforts. Talking to people there you could really see this turn in real time, and you can only imagine if Western governments had spent half the energy they spent rebuking China on actually preparing contingency plans perhaps things would not have gotten so out of hand..

If you've got a totaltarian grip on your nation to the point that Social Standing Points are a LITERAL THING but still can't enforce basic food hygiene then yeah, of course people are going to say your backwards. People do the same to the USA when they brag about having the best healthcare, yet are way down the list and puts more money into tanks that'll never get used.

[Kirby101]

Also, protesting the Iraq War was definitely not the mainstream Democratic position at the time, hence why so many politicians have had to defend their votes on the AUMF in the years since.

Congressional Democrats vote on Iraq Resolution; 81 for, 126 against. You want to just admit you were wrong about this one?

Let's look at your original statement;

I remember that OTHER countries were protesting America trying to drag them into the Iraq War, but there was nary a peep about it here, whether in the media or the public. There was pretty much universal consensus that Saddam was somehow connected to Al Qaeda and that an invasion was totally justified, and that any country that didn't get with the program was just as much an enemy as they were. Remember freedom fries?

[PwrdOn]

Congressional Democrats vote on Iraq Resolution; 81 for, 126 against. You want to just admit you were wrong about this one?

Let's look at your original statement;

I was just going off my own recollection at the time, you can't honestly tell me that the only people who supported the Iraq War were brainwashed GOP ghouls and that all right-minded liberals were vocally opposed to it.

[Kirby101]

I was just going off my own recollection at the time, you can't honestly tell me that the only people who supported the Iraq War were brainwashed GOP ghouls and that all right-minded liberals were vocally opposed to it.

Of course not. But that is so far from "universal consensus" and "nary a peep" as to be irrelevant. It's okay to say your recollections of the time are wrong, which they obviously were.

[TheDarman]

Nobody did take the government's word on blind faith, there was unprecedented public opposition within China to the mishandling of the virus at first. However, when Westerners started to chime in with their usual orientalist canards about how the outbreak was an indictment on how backwards China was, the conversation completely shifted toward near universal support for the government's containment efforts. Talking to people there you could really see this turn in real time, and you can only imagine if Western governments had spent half the energy they spent rebuking China on actually preparing contingency plans perhaps things would not have gotten so out of hand.

So, we can’t rebuke China for its mishandling of the crisis because we, ourselves, didn’t prepare adequately? I just really don’t understand why we can’t do both—especially since the poor government response and lack of transparency on China’s part made it difficult for other nations to act quicker, especially since the public policy remedies are not typically popular ones. It is true, meanwhile, that Trump and Johnson, in particular, have been real bad at dealing with this crisis and has led to our recovery being slower than it need be. I just think that this lays out a false choice.

As far as the Democratic party platform, as usual it's pretty disjointed and incoherent. They recognize that the American public generally doesn't like China and wants to appeal to that sensibility, but at the same time they aren't really committed to economic decoupling because they have no interest in trying to rebuild the industrial base at home or providing for American workers, nor to military pressure because they don't want to expend the blood and treasure to make that happen. As best as I can tell their strategy is to try and isolate China internationally while trying to replace their workers with even cheaper labor from places like Vietnam or India, which will certainly backfire because as those countries start to build up their economic and geopolitical strength they'll probably want to expand their power and influence as well instead of just remaining docile servants of Western hegemony.

There is near universal understanding that open trade does, in aggregate, increase the economic well-being of both parties. While it isn’t necessarily an equal advancement for both parties, increased diversification is helpful. The issue the United States has had with its trade policy response is it hasn’t provided resources for the folks that have suffered from this creative destruction. Plus, economic entanglement is good for diplomacy and can largely be credited for the peaceful nature of the world relative to the 19th and early 20th Centuries. I don’t think we should be looking to pick fights with the Chinese Government in such a way that would potentially lead to real incentives to cause a war. Instead, we should be looking at doing what we did under the Obama Administration in establishing cooperative measures to track outbreaks and be able to inform the public, both within the country and outside of it. Having other governments’ health officials in your country would yield incentives against misleading the public on how bad it is or, at least, being more transparent about what you do and don’t know about it.

[PaulBullion]

Bolsonaro cheering (and coughing over) a crowd of supporters calling for a military coup today.

Unspeakable.

Video: https://twitter.com/octavio_ferraz/s...678778368?s=20

[PwrdOn]

So, we can’t rebuke China for its mishandling of the crisis because we, ourselves, didn’t prepare adequately? I just really don’t understand why we can’t do both—especially since the poor government response and lack of transparency on China’s part made it difficult for other nations to act quicker, especially since the public policy remedies are not typically popular ones. It is true, meanwhile, that Trump and Johnson, in particular, have been real bad at dealing with this crisis and has led to our recovery being slower than it need be. I just think that this lays out a false choice.

But how exactly did China make it more difficult for other countries to prepare? They shared the genetic sequence of the virus early on, and while everyone now loves to claim that they hid the true death toll without any real evidence for that, that's only because their reported infection rates look low to us now because we know how much worse it can get. The way that the outbreak was being reported at the onset, the official government tally was already being presented as a major disaster, although rather than taking it as a warning, most of pundits could barely contain their glee that this evil communist regime was finally getting what was coming to it and even entertain the possibility that the virus might spread here. Of course there are plenty of things you can criticize about how the Chinese government handled the outbreak, but it requires some major leaps of logic to believe that anything they did mattered more than our government twiddling their thumbs for nearly two months when all of this information was out in the open. This country already has a pretty long history of trying to scapegoat dirty foreigners for just about everything that goes wrong, what are the odds that this time our xenophobia just so happened to be justified?

[PaulBullion]

In what is now a regular occurrence, President Jair Bolsonaro left self-isolation this weekend, mingled in crowds and participated in small protests in the greater Brasilia area, disobeying recommendations by the WHO on how to avoid Covid-19 transmission. On Sunday afternoon (April 19) he gave a speech to a group of supporters in front of the Army Headquarters. Among the signs waved there were some which called for military intervention and a new Institutional Act-5, the 1968 coup within a coup which shut down Congress, banned political parties and suspended the right to habeas corpus.

From the top of a sound truck, Bolsonaro gave a speech tailored for his supporters, which was frequently interrupted by a strong cough

http://www.brasilwire.com/coughing-f...up-supporters/

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

So Kagan joined Alito and Roberts in one of the dumbest dissents I’ve ever seen